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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26695465">Impulse Decisions</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mirradin/pseuds/Mirradin'>Mirradin</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Old Guard (Movie 2020)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood and Gore, Canon-Typical Violence, Captivity, Escape, Eventual Romance, Human Experimentation, Hurt/Comfort, Internal Conflict, Minor Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Rescue</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 05:00:17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>17,309</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26695465</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mirradin/pseuds/Mirradin</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Nile didn't dream of Quynh in the safehouse. The team were asleep when the raid began. They never had a chance to fight back.</p><p>Five years later, a disillusioned Dizzy Ali takes a job as a security guard at Merrick Pharmaceuticals. It's a steady job, the pay is good, and she's had plenty of practice at keeping her mouth shut.</p><p>Maybe not like this, though.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Dizzy Ali/Nile Freeman</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>72</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>147</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. The Discovery</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Nile gets shipped off to Germany after she gets her throat cut. Dizzy gets a couple more rounds of debrief, and then a week later orders come down that she and Jay are getting transferred to a new base. Dizzy sits on her bed with her bags mostly packed and stares at the stack of letters and photographs that Nile left behind.</p><p>“We should hang on to it,” Jay says after a while. “She might want it back.”</p><p>Dizzy’s pretty sure Nile won’t want any reminder of her and Jay, but she takes the photo and stuffs it into her pack anyway. Jay takes the picture of Nile’s dad, and then they go to wait for their ride.</p><p>Nile never does come back from Germany. Jay and Dizzy and Gita keep on doing their jobs, just with a new corporal called Calloway and a few more unanswered questions. Dizzy keeps her ears open, because whatever was up with Nile that was a lousy way to split, but she never does hear anything more and after a while she stops hoping to.</p><p>She keeps the picture of the three of them, her and Jay and Nile. There’s no real reason except maybe a guilty conscience; she leaves it at the bottom of her pack and doesn’t even take it out to look at it, it just feels like she owes Nile that much.</p><p>Neither of them joined up wanting to make a career out of it – well, Dizzy thought she might, but what happened with Nile soured her on the idea – so Dizzy and Jay serve out their terms and then Jay goes into college to study engineering and Dizzy takes her six years of combat experience and goes into private security. There’s more money in it, if you have the right background – funny how many businessmen will pay to have an ex-Marine on staff when they never go anywhere near a hot zone – and enough of a lower chance of being shot at that she’s willing to make the trade. She does a two-year stint with an oil mogul near the border in North Dakota, another one and a half with a tech start-up in Silicon Valley -- the last one’s an asshole who thinks he knows better than everyone who works for him, and Dizzy doesn’t shed any tears when the start-up goes bust. She takes a few days to catch up on sleep and drink through what there is of her severance package, and she’s wondering whether she should swing by Atlanta to see Jay when word comes through that Merrick Pharmaceuticals is hiring.</p><p>It's not a hard choice. Merrick has a rep for paying well and letting the experts get on with it, which makes up for demanding standards and the fact that the job is in England. There’s not much tying her to the States anyway, apart from Jay and her dad. Dizzy puts her name in, and after a long series of interviews, background checks, and visa applications – complicated by Britain breaking up with the EU – she starts her first shift in August with three other fresh recruits.</p><p>The first month is the standard boring probation period, and one of Dizzy’s fellow newbies gets fired at the end of week three for insufficient discipline. The first day of the second month is when things get weird.</p><p>“Doctor Kozak’s research is all on this floor,” Keane tells the gaggle of newbies, keying in a code to the high-tech door on the fifteenth floor. Dizzy remembers Kozak’s name from yesterday’s induction; something about wound healing. “It is, by far, the most sensitive project the company is working on. Security here is second only to Merrick’s personal safety.”</p><p>Dizzy nods sharply, and she and her co-workers follow their boss into the lab, through a maze of shelving and equipment. Keane wasn’t joking about the security level; in addition to the two armed guards manning the door they came in by, Dizzy spots three down the end of the corridor by the freight elevator, and another two on either side of the door at the other end of the lab. Seems like a lot of manpower for a pharma lab outside of a warzone, to Dizzy, but she’s not the one making the call. Keane seems professional and sharp from what she’s seen so far, and in any event he’s in charge; she’ll trust his judgement.</p><p>“The sources of her research,” Keane goes on, opening a door and leading them down rows of empty rat cages, “are kept in this lab.” He turns a corner and they fetch up at yet another door, with another pair of armed guards flanking it. There’s one obvious security camera trained on the door, which means there are probably another two that Dizzy can’t spot yet, and a long lab bench with a couple of safety cabinets set well back to give plenty of manoeuvring space.</p><p>Keane nods to the blonde woman in a lab coat working at the bench. “Any of them off limits, Doctor?”</p><p>“Just Andomache,” Doctor Kozak replies, glancing up briefly. Keane nods acknowledgement and swipes his access card. Kozak opens a drawer and puts on a pair of heavy-duty earmuffs before returning to her work.</p><p>Both standing guards take up ready-fire positions. Dizzy hasn’t been told to be ready for combat, so she doesn’t reach for her gun, but she loosens her shoulders and shifts her balance as she follows Keane inside, just in case she needs to move fast.</p><p>Her first impression is <em>hospital</em>, which is unexpected, if not out of place, but doesn’t explain the guns.</p><p>“Oh, is it orientation day already?” someone asks. Dizzy steps out from behind Keane and…</p><p>It’s a tired-looking blond guy in maybe his early forties, with a scruffy beard and uncombed hair. His feet are bare and he’s wearing a flimsy hospital gown, with wires taped to his arms and temples. He’s strapped down to an operating table. The straps go around his wrists, his upper arms, his waist and his legs; he’s not getting out of them without divine intervention.</p><p>Keane calmly pulls out his handgun and shoots him in the chest.</p><p>Two of the other recruits start. Dizzy doesn’t. The blond guy collapses like a dropped puppet with a hole straight through his breastbone, and Dizzy flexes her hands into fists and relaxes them, takes a deep, quiet breath to steady herself as Keane holsters his gun. It was a clean shot, straight to the heart; Keane’s as good a shot as he is a commander. The blond guy’s slumped back on the operating table, staring lifelessly at the ceiling.</p><p>It's a good shot. Just not what she expects to see in a pharmaceutical lab.</p><p>Not that she was expecting any of this in a pharmaceutical lab. There are four operating tables in a row, with the dead guy on the left end, and all of them are occupied. Off to the right is a woman in a railed hospital bed. Dizzy doesn’t recognise most of the equipment out on the countertops, beyond things like vials and syringes, but she recognises the three heavy-duty leather gags on a table near the door. One’s been nearly bitten through.</p><p>“These four people are extremely resilient,” Keane says, gesturing to the row of operating tables. The dark-haired man next to the blond guy stares back with steady grey eyes that move from Keane to each of the newbies, judging them in turn. The Middle Eastern guy on the next table just mutters something acerbic and then turns back to the last person in the row, a black woman staring over at the dead guy with her jaw set. Something about her pings Dizzy as familiar, but Dizzy doesn’t have attention to spare for that right now. “They do not age, their wounds heal unusually fast, and they cannot be killed. Lethal injuries will heal in a matter of minutes if not less.”</p><p><em>That’s impossible, </em>Dizzy thinks, and then the dead guy jerks in his restraints and sucks in a whooping, agonised breath.</p><p>Dizzy just about jumps out of her skin. The dead guy – the ex-dead guy? – coughs a couple of times, painfully, then lets his head drop back against the headrest. The paper gown is sodden with blood around the bullet hole, but the stain isn’t spreading any more.</p><p>Fucking hell. Dizzy’s stomach roils with more than just the leftover adrenaline from the gunshot. That was something she’s seen a thousand times; this is…fuck. This is unbelievable, except that the blond guy has a bloodstained bullet hole over his heart, and now he’s turning his head to meet the dark-haired man’s eyes with an exhausted look, his breathing slowly settling out.</p><p>Keane gives them a moment to take a good look before he goes on. “Before they were brought in, these people were operating as a mercenary team. Evidence suggests they had been doing so for several hundred years, and have corresponding amounts of combat experience. That woman -” He nods to the woman lying in the railed hospital bed, chained to it with padded cuffs “—no longer regenerates when injured, but she is <em>extremely</em> dangerous in unarmed combat. Work in teams of three if you need to handle one of them, and if they get loose, shoot to kill and restrain the body.”</p><p>“Sir,” Dizzy acknowledges. Her stomach is tight and the adrenaline is hitting her knees in jittery tremors, but keeping it off her face and out of her posture is an old habit by now. The woman in the hospital bed is looking at Keane with a calm, focused expression that goes beyond <em>murderous</em> into a long-held intent to kill, and somehow it’s not at all hard to believe that she’s centuries old. It’s not at all hard to believe that she’s the most dangerous person Dizzy’s ever seen.</p><p>Keane gives her a hard look that travels on to the other two newbies, scrutinizing them for weakness. Dizzy swallows back the bitterness in her mouth and buries it under professionalism. She must pass the test, because Keane nods to her in approval and leads them out of the lab.</p><p>“Booker,” she hears someone say before the door closes. She blots it out and goes to get her new schedule sorted.</p><p>***</p><p>As soon as work is over, Dizzy finds the closest liquor store that’ll sell her a bottle of vodka at a decent price. Her fellow newbies head out with faces like they plan on doing something similar, and the old hands look at them like they were expecting it. Dizzy cannot bring herself to give enough of a fuck not to buy the vodka, but she waits until she’s back at her shoebox apartment with the door locked and the radio on before she starts in on it.</p><p>Okay. Fine.</p><p>The prisoners don’t bother her so much. Nobody goes into private security on her level if they have a problem with their employers getting up to shady shit where the public can’t see; Dizzy heard rumours while she was working with the oil mogul, and that doesn’t hold a candle to what she was part of on behalf of the U.S. government. It’s the job. She’s a professional. She doesn’t exactly like it, but…fine.</p><p>Morality isn’t so much a big thing in Dizzy’s world, but reliability counts, and Merrick is nothing if not reliable. All right, the captives are unexpected, but that’s none of her business in any way except the logistical one. She’ll walk her rounds, and move them if she has to, and if one of them kicks it for real she’ll help dispose of the body. She hasn’t been squeamish for a long time.</p><p>Merrick is her employer. She does her job. If she ever believed in anything beyond that, she left it behind in Afghanistan.</p><p>Dizzy takes another swallow and stares into the orange-tinted darkness outside her window.</p><p>Fuck, though. She thinks about the blond guy slumped on the table with a bullet hole through his sternum. There’s no way to fake a kill shot like that, not with the way the colour went out of him. That was real.</p><p>He was dead, and then he was alive again. That doesn’t happen. It happened anyway.</p><p>Fuck this, she needs a distraction. Dizzy thunks the bottle down on the table and goes to cook something.</p><p>Most of what she has is microwave meals, but there’s a bottle of pasta sauce in the back of the fridge. It’ll have to do. Halfway through she thinks of the bloody patch on the gown again. She must have imagined seeing a glimpse of unbroken skin through the bullet hole. With that much blood, and that small a hole, how would you even notice? Just her fucking overactive imagination making things worse again.</p><p>She manages to put the whole thing out of her mind while she eats and clears up – good thing she’s had plenty of practice; even with her stomach the memory doesn’t go well with food. Afterwards, she sits in front of the TV with the bottle and lets the mindless babble of late-night programming take up her mind.</p><p>And she thinks of Nile, bleeding out underneath her in a dirt-poor house in Afghanistan. Nile choking on her own breath, blood seeping from her mouth. Nile’s hands clutching at her, then shaking, then falling still, the light fading from her eyes as her blood soaked into the dirt floor. Blood on Dizzy’s hands, in Nile’s hair, soaked into the knees of Dizzy’s uniform fatigues, blood pumping from a slash that gaped wider than Dizzy’s palm could cover. Blood that pulsed out between her fingers, and then under her palm, and then just leaked.</p><p>And Nile, two days later, sitting up in a hospital bed back at the base, bowed over her necklace, her neck smooth and unmarked from her jaw clean down to her collarbone.</p><p>
  <em>“They, uh. They used this new skin graft or something.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“That what the doctor said?”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“…yeah. That’s what they said.”</em>
</p><p>Maybe Nile was right. Probably she was right. What Dizzy knows about skin grafts is somewhere between jack and shit. Probably they used some new experimental thing and Nile got lucky.</p><p>It’s not like what happened with the blond guy in the lab. He came back in under a minute. Nile was out for two fucking days before Dizzy and Jay got in to see her. Plenty of time for the doctors to do…whatever they did. It’s not the same thing.</p><p>It looks a fuck of a lot like the same thing.</p><p>It…might actually be the same thing.</p><p>Dizzy takes a swig of her vodka and tries to focus on the show. The phantom smell of blood rises in her nose. She was kneeling in a pool of it when the Medevac finally showed up.</p><p>They would’ve given Nile a blood transfusion, sure. Blood transfusions are something a military hospital is amply equipped to do. Blood transfusions just don’t do shit when someone’s heart has stopped. Dizzy remembers the blood swelling up in waves between her fingers, and she remembers when the surges turned into a steady seeping.</p><p>Okay, yeah. Maybe. <em>Maybe</em> it’s the same fucking thing<em>.</em> Maybe it wasn’t just shock and adrenaline flooding Dizzy’s brain, making her think she saw something she didn’t. Maybe Nile died under her hands in that house.</p><p><em>Maybe</em> Nile died, and then she came back. Dizzy isn’t convinced, but…if that’s what happened, no wonder the brass wanted to figure out what was up. Dizzy wonders if whoever they had running tests on Nile got any further than Doctor Kozak.</p><p>…there was another woman in the lab, wasn’t there?</p><p>It’s hard to remember. The blond guy’s face is burned into Dizzy’s memory, but she wasn’t really looking at the other people so much. The one next to the blond guy was a white man with dark hair, she remembers that much. Grey eyes – or they could have been blue; some pale colour anyway. Next to him was a man – Middle-Eastern, maybe with a beard – and on the right end of the row…</p><p>Dizzy grinds the heels of her palms into her eyes, but the image won’t come clear. Dark skin, paper gown, she <em>thinks</em> female, but the face…nothing. She can’t remember the hairstyle either, if it was long or short, whether it was done in Nile’s cornrows.</p><p>Okay, so there’s another woman in the lab. That doesn’t mean anything. Nile was a <em>Marine</em>. Sure, she got sent off for tests, but that was to a military lab in Germany, not a civilian outfit in London. They sent a plane for her, and while the military can fuck up in amazing ways, they are generally very good at getting people where they want them; if Nile got on that plane, then she got off it in Germany. Merrick might be richer than God, but he can’t buy a U.S. Marine out of a military lab. Dizzy has faith in very little, but <em>that </em>she knows like gravity.</p><p>It can’t be Nile. Dizzy would have recognised her. It’s just a random woman who can’t die and joined a mercenary team, which is proof enough that it’s not Nile, because Nile would never do that. Some of the squad, sure – Dizzy’s only a couple steps removed from it herself, when she lets herself think about it. But Nile cared about what was <em>right</em>.</p><p>Yeah, definitely not Nile. Dizzy blows out a long breath and switches off the TV. Case closed. She can stop thinking about it.</p><p>Before she goes to bed, she digs the photo out from the bottom of her suitcase. The glass has cracked in two long lines, but Nile’s smile is still clear.</p><p>***</p><p>Not thinking about it is harder than it should be.</p><p>Dizzy’s on a rotating shift pattern now that she’s cleared for the fifteenth floor, and by the end of the week, she’s more or less managed to settle into a routine. The security team is forty strong, and there are only a couple of people assigned to Kozak’s inner lab at a time, so she hasn’t had to go back in. It should make it easier to put the thought out of her mind, but instead it’s grown into a constant niggling under her breastbone.</p><p>Second week is night shift. Dizzy’s never been <em>fond </em>of night shift, exactly, but at least it’s quiet, and Rusco is easy enough company – he’s ex-British Army, and he’s been working for Keane for eight years. Morton is newer, and also British – former Navy SEAL – and both of them are professionals, so they pass the shift in quiet conversation about rugby while keeping their eyes on the approaches.</p><p>The patrol rounds break up the monotony a bit. The lab’s thoroughly monitored, especially Doctor Kozak’s section of it, but cameras can be spoofed, and they don’t cover every angle, so someone has to walk through every two hours and check that everything’s above-board. Rusco takes the eight o’clock round and comes back looking annoyed.</p><p>“Anything interesting?” Dizzy asks idly, glancing out at the sleeping city. London at night is almost as boring as the Mojave, at least from fifteen stories up, but boring is good.</p><p>“Just the evening singalong.” Rusco steps past her to take up the position closest to the elevator. His shoulders are stiff, and he’s carrying his rifle a fraction higher than strictly necessary. “Bloody caterwauling.”</p><p>“Thought they’d stopped doing that,” Morton says idly.</p><p>“You and me both.”</p><p>“They sing?” Dizzy asks. She won’t say she <em>never </em>saw Nile sing, there were a few rounds of somewhat-inebriated karaoke before they got deployed to Afghanistan, but it wasn’t something she really did for fun. There’s another piece of proof that it’s a different woman in the lab.</p><p>Morton shrugs. “They used to, couple of years ago. Sea shanties and such. Looked like they mostly did it to annoy the doctor, it pretty much stopped after she moved her computer out of the room.”</p><p>“They’re on to some foreign muck now,” Rusco grumbles. “Sounds bloody awful.”</p><p>“Least we can’t hear it out here,” Dizzy comments.</p><p>Rusco grunts. “If they’ve got energy to sing they’re feeling lively. Might be a bit more rowdy for a few days. I’ll let morning shift know.” He gives Dizzy a sideways look. “You had a shift on the lab yet, Ali?”</p><p>Dizzy shakes her head. “Just orientation.”</p><p>Morton snorts quietly.</p><p>“Word of advice.” Rusco turns to look back down the corridor. “If one of the two in the middle starts acting up, easiest way to stop it’s to pull a taser on the other one. Or one of the others, if the doctor’s got one of them off limits, but that’s fastest.”</p><p>Dizzy adjusts her hold on her rifle. “Good to know.”</p><p>“Don’t try it on Andromache, though,” Morton warns. “Doc says she’s too fragile, and Keane will sink you in the Thames if you do something the doctor can’t fix. Stick to one of the immortals – the girl works best, for preference.”</p><p>The girl she didn’t get a good look at. “Sure. Thanks.”</p><p>Rusco and Morton go back to discussing last night’s game. Dizzy listens with half an ear; apparently Leicester aren’t doing great. The occasional car goes past outside, a long way below.</p><p>Morton takes the ten o’clock round and comes back shaking his head. “All quiet. Think they’re sleeping.”</p><p>“Thank fuck,” Rusco says. Dizzy hums noncommittal agreement. “You think Northampton have any chance on Saturday?”</p><p>“They ought to swap out Gigena,” Morton’s saying later, when his watch beeps. He glances down at it. “Midnight.”</p><p>“I’ll take the lab round,” Dizzy says. Better hold up her end of the work. She waits for Rusco’s nod before moving off.</p><p>The lab looks different at night, the way all places look different at night, with the lights off and the people gone. It doesn’t bother Dizzy. It makes her feel hidden, almost, like something ready to attack from ambush if a threat shows up. It makes it easier to think the thoughts she shouldn’t be having at work – or shouldn’t be having at all, really, except maybe halfway down a bottle.</p><p>Nile isn’t in the lab, but Dizzy’s imagination won’t shut up, so <em>fine</em>. She’ll just have to prove it. She’ll go in and take a look, and Nile won’t be there, and then the queasy slivers of her conscience will finally shut up and fuck off back where she’s buried them, and she can go back to doing her damn job without any qualms. Simple. She’ll be done in five minutes, and then she can finally <em>sleep</em>.</p><p>The outer lab opens to her keycard, the machinery humming away, the plastic tanks of liquid churning quietly. Dizzy threads her way through to the inner lab, the place she’s only been to once before. Swipes her card for access.</p><p>It’s not completely dark inside. There’s light from strategically-placed emergency lighting panels, plus the ambient glow from the heart rate monitors and other things Dizzy can’t identify, keeping the room light enough for the security cameras. It’s bright enough that Dizzy couldn’t sleep comfortably in it, but the people on the operating tables don’t seem to be having any trouble. The blond guy’s snoring quietly like he didn’t get shot in the chest a week ago.</p><p>She can’t make all of them out clearly from the door, so she takes a step inside and lets it close behind her, then takes a couple more steps. It’s not necessary, but nobody’s going to call her out for being thorough.</p><p>“Nile,” she says into the quiet stillness, testing.</p><p>“Yeah?” says a soft voice. The woman on the end of the row turns her head towards the people on the other operating tables, blinking sleepily in the dim light, and oh, oh <em>shit</em>, Dizzy can't fucking breathe.</p><p>Oh holy mother of fuck.</p><p>Dizzy opens her mouth, and what comes out is “…skin graft, huh.”</p><p>Nile blinks and looks at her. She doesn't look a single day older than she did in Afghanistan. Her forehead is creased in confusion and her eyes are tired, but that's all. She looks at Dizzy without interest, and then her eyes go wide and she sits up as far as the restraints will let her.</p><p>“Dizzy?” Nile whispers, staring at Dizzy like she can’t believe what she’s seeing.</p><p>“Wait, you know each other?” the bearded guy next to Nile says, looking blearily between the two of them.</p><p>“Served together,” Nile says, not taking her eyes off Dizzy.</p><p>The paralysis breaks. “Yeah,” Dizzy says. “Nile, what the fuck are you doing here, I thought they sent you to <em>Germany!</em>”</p><p>Nile sort of shrugs, a restricted little movement. “Never made it.”</p><p>“Merrick’s a civ.” Nile snorts softly, and Dizzy presses the point. “You’re a <em>Marine</em>!”</p><p>Nile drops her eyes, her mouth twisting up. “I <em>was</em> a Marine.”</p><p>Oh.</p><p>Dizzy glances down at the floor, all her momentum gone. When she looks up, Nile is staring at her again.</p><p>“What are you doing here?” Nile asks quietly.</p><p>Dizzy hefts the rifle. “What does it look like?”</p><p>Nile swallows and nods. Something in her eyes changes, Dizzy thinks, a sort of flattening. It’s hard to see.</p><p>“Where’s Jay?” Nile asks after a moment.</p><p>“College.”</p><p>“Thought you were staying in.”</p><p>Dizzy breathes out and looks down at the rifle. “This pays better.”</p><p>And…that’s it, isn’t it. This is her job now. This is what she signed on for. Nile’s here and so is Dizzy and none of that matters at all. This is what she’s being paid for.</p><p>She turns on her heel and strides towards the door.</p><p>“So you’re just going to leave?” the bearded man demands. The door swings shut on anything else he says. Dizzy doesn’t care. She walks away from the lab with her hands tight on her rifle and completes the rest of her round with her back straight and she does not skip a single beat, she does not miss a single thing, she is meticulous and disciplined and she won’t let anyone think she can’t be relied on.</p><p>She stops a moment in the outer lab to let the tension out of her shoulders. Her shirt is sticking to the back of her neck, but it’s not like anyone else can tell. She takes a deep breath, and then walks out into the corridor to rejoin her group.</p><p>“Anything interesting?” Rusco asks.</p><p>Dizzy takes her position. “One of them was feeling chatty.”</p><p>“About?”</p><p>Dizzy shakes her head. “Nothing much. Just insults.”</p><p>Morton snorts.</p><p>Dizzy finishes her shift, and then she goes home, back to her shoebox apartment, and then she shoves Nile’s picture to the bottom of the suitcase and finishes off the vodka and goes to bed and doesn’t dream.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. The Decision</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Dizzy wakes up the next day and knows what she’s going to do.</p><p>She’ll go to Keane and report a conflict of interest. He’ll reassign her. He won’t be happy about it, because it’s a sensitive posting and now she has information she ideally shouldn’t, but he won’t blame her. Professionals understand that sometimes things like this happen, especially in this line of work, and punishing people for reporting them just leads to compromised people keeping their mouths shut and staying in jobs they can’t be trusted to do, and Keane is absolutely a professional. No harm, no foul. He’ll get her off the fifteenth floor and change her accesses so she can’t get in even if she wants to, and she’ll give him what he needs to make sure that nobody else Nile knows can slip through the background checks, and then maybe they’ll want to lock her into an extended contract or shuffle her to a different facility so she can’t pass anything on, but that’s <em>fine</em>, it’s guaranteed long-term income and it’s not like England is a total backwater. They might not want her to talk to Jay, but…she can live with that. She’ll have to.</p><p>Okay, ideally she should have reported it to Rusco last night and got an escort off the floor, but she can tell Keane she wanted to bring the problem straight to him; that’s valid. She’ll still have reported it in good faith. It’ll be clear that she’s prioritizing Merrick’s interests, that she understands discretion but she’s reliable. It won’t be a reason to waste her.</p><p>This mess with Nile is only a problem if she doesn’t report it, because if she doesn’t report it, and someone finds out, that’s going to look like conspiracy to provide aid. And if that happens, Dizzy is going to be so deep in the shit that the entire U.S. army couldn’t pull her out again. Keane is a professional. Time between him finding out and her ending up in the ocean would be five hours, tops, and that includes the interrogation. Dizzy isn’t going to risk it.</p><p>It won’t be the first time she’s let Nile down.</p><p>She swings her legs out of bed, fully resolved, and barely stumbles when the hangover hits her. “Ugh, son of a <em>bitch</em>…”</p><p>That resolve carries her all the way through the rest of the day until she arrives at work. She’s made a habit of getting in twenty minutes early, both to account for potential delays on the Underground and because it gives her more time to get ready. Today it’ll also give her extra time to catch Keane; he doesn’t ever go <em>off</em>-duty exactly, since people need to contact him if there’s an emergency, but he goes home after the afternoon shift does the handover to night shift.</p><p>She’s planning to go find him in the control room, but instead he shows up in the break room while she’s tugging on her armour, what with London police tending to look askance at people riding around on the Underground kitted out in Kevlar. “Ali.”</p><p>“Sir,” Dizzy acknowledges, standing up with the laces on her left shoe half-done.</p><p>“Heard one of the prisoners was talking to you last night.” Keane doesn’t look suspicious, but he doesn’t look too happy about it, either, which is unwelcome but not surprising. Giving prisoners a bit of smack-talk is unprofessional but tolerable; having a <em>conversation </em>is edging into rookie mistake territory.</p><p><em>Sir, I need to report a conflict of interest. </em>“Yeah, the girl thought I was someone she knew from school.”</p><p>Keane’s eyebrows twitch up. “Someone she knew from school?”</p><p>Dizzy’s too well-disciplined to shrug when she’s talking to her commander. She looks him in the eye and delivers her report straight. “Yes, someone called, uh, Angie, I think she said. I told her I’d never met her, she said we had Maths together, then the one next to her started yelling and I left.” Nile grew up in Chicago, south side; Dizzy grew up in Seattle, and her paperwork’s said <em>Zoe Ali </em>since she was born. Anyone who checks that link is going to find that Dizzy is telling the exact truth: She did not know Nile in school.</p><p>Keane’s frowning, now. “Did she say where?”</p><p>“Hyde Park, I think.” Nile did go to Hyde Park; they swapped stories on deployment about where they were from, when the homesickness rose up like a tide. Nile went to Hyde Park, and at least one time she had Math with someone called Angie, who stole her necklace, although Dizzy doesn’t actually know if she and Angie look anything alike apart from Angie also having dark hair.</p><p>“Hmm.” Keane nods. “We’ll check it out. And if one of them talks to you again, don’t wait around to report it.”</p><p>Dizzy exhales. “No, sir.” It’s a mild enough reprimand, and hopefully easy to follow, since she plans on getting into zero more conversations with Nile.</p><p>She waits for Keane to leave and then goes back to lacing her shoes up mechanically. <em>Fuck. </em>Why the hell did she do that? She had her opportunity right there, all she had to do was say it, and it’s not like she can go after him and tell him <em>actually, I lied, I know Nile because we served together in Afghanistan, and I told you she thought I was someone else because I-don’t-even-know-why</em> – well, okay, she <em>can</em>, but she’d better put one fuck of a good spin on it. <em>I didn’t want to tell you in front of the rest of the team</em> is only halfway an excuse since it’s not like she couldn’t have asked to take the conversation somewhere <em>private</em>, and <em>I didn’t want you to think it would compromise me</em> is, okay, people <em>do </em>say that but in Dizzy’s experience the ones who do are idiots, since if she’d reported it he’d want to know how badly she was compromised <em>anyway</em>. She’s just sunk her chance of doing this the smart way into the fucking Atlantic, <em>for no fucking reason</em>.</p><p>Dizzy grits her teeth and picks up her rifle, ignoring how slippery her palms are. Okay, fine. She’ll just have to spend this shift thinking of a <em>really good </em>excuse.</p><p>By four A.M., she still hasn’t come up with anything. She’s managed to avoid walking a lab round, which was probably the right choice even apart from the obvious <em>conflict of interest to report </em>issue, because according to Rusco and Morton, someone’s been awake and watching the door every time a patrol came through.</p><p>Gibson from the control room confirms it during shift handover. “Hard to tell, but I think they were sleeping in shifts. There was movement about two minutes before the door opened, different one each time.”</p><p>Her fault. Dizzy sets her jaw and glares down at her rifle. Hopefully her teammates will take it for embarrassment, not…whatever it is she feels about Nile staying awake for the lab patrols in case Dizzy showed up again.</p><p>Which is nothing. She doesn’t feel anything. She got over her guilt a long time ago, and this is just more of the same.</p><p>An entire week of night shift goes by, and Dizzy can’t come up with a decent excuse. By now it’s too late; she’s done the lab round eight times – ducking her head through the door instead of stepping inside, like everybody else does – and if she reports it, Keane’s going to assume collusion, or sabotage.</p><p>Dizzy might get out of that discussion alive, but she probably wouldn’t get out in any shape to continue her line of work.</p><p>All right. She’s just going to have to…keep it under the radar. Not say anything. There’s been plenty of time for someone to check out the high school story, and Dizzy hasn’t heard anything, which means there hasn’t <em>been </em>anything. Nile hasn’t tried talking to her again, so either she hasn’t recognised Dizzy in the four seconds she gets each time Dizzy looks through the door, or she just…isn’t bothering.</p><p>Which is fair. It’s not like Nile doesn’t have practice with Dizzy letting her down when it counts, either.</p><p>Dizzy goes out clubbing on her day off, which is at least a decent fucking distraction. She even gets laid, if a ten-minute hookup in a piss-damp alley counts as getting laid. It’s wildly unsatisfying, but that’s just par for the fucking course. It knocks all her thoughts about Nile and Keane and her damn job out of her conscious mind for a good nine hours, which is worth it, and she’s halfway settled in her skin when she has to get back to work.</p><p>***</p><p>This week she’s on morning shift. It’s easier to stay awake through than night shift, although while years of discipline makes starting work at four A.M. <em>easier</em>, nothing will ever make the prospect <em>appealing.</em></p><p>Still, at least it’s more engaging. Apart from Doctor Kozak, there are another three scientists working on the fifteenth floor, although they’re restricted to the outer lab, working on cell lines and DNA. Dizzy’s not sure how much they know, exactly; nobody talks to them about the inner lab or the people inside it, and nobody says the word <em>prisoners</em> around them, but on the other hand they can hardly have missed the heavy security presence. She sticks to keeping her mouth shut, since that’s the obvious thing to do.</p><p>Just how much opportunity there is for them to notice something becomes apparent an hour and a half before shift changeover on Wednesday, when Dizzy’s radio crackles.</p><p>“<em>Alpha two-two, this is Alpha three-one, we’ve got an injury on the lab team, need a replacement.”</em></p><p>“Alpha two-two. Copy that, I’m on my way,” Rusco replies. He jerks his head at Dizzy and Morton. Dizzy steps forward to take point, and Rusco heads off.</p><p>Three minutes later, Thompson comes out nursing his hand. Dizzy takes a closer look and whistles.</p><p>“Fucking Andromache,” Thompson says by way of explanation. His jaw is tight, but that’s the only sign he’s in pain. This is impressive, because his fingers have been broken in the most professional way Dizzy’s ever seen. She’s no medic, but even she can tell that the bones are damn near breaking skin. Thompson has self-control. “I don’t know why we have to move her every day, it’d be less trouble just to let her get bedsores. It’s not like Kozak couldn’t keep her alive.”</p><p>“Regulations,” Morton says with sympathetic sarcasm. Thomson snorts a laugh and heads off to get his hand bandaged up. Dizzy clocks at least one scientist in earshot of the exchange – Malvin the post-doc, who spends a good eighty percent of his time fiddling with one specific machine – but neither Thompson nor Morton seems too bothered.</p><p>That evening she flops on the couch and googles <em>Andromacky</em>. The first result she gets is a Wikipedia page about some king’s wife in Ancient Greece, who lost multiple husbands and children and cried over them for a long time. Dizzy thinks about the woman in the hospital bed, and Thompson’s expertly broken fingers, and shakes her head. The two images can’t line up. The story of the dutiful widow frays away like dust under that level stare.</p><p>Most of the first page is the same Andromacky, or rather Andromache, but one of the links at the bottom takes her to something different:</p><p>
  <em>Andromache the Scythian. The eternal warrior.</em>
</p><p>The article is short, only a couple of paragraphs. It’s more myth than history: Andromache fought Heracles and fell on the battlefield at Troy. It’s not much. If it’s the same person, she’d be over three thousand years old.</p><p>Dizzy thinks about the woman in the lab, and she can’t quite make that image line up either. Andromache the Scythian is something larger than life, something unreal. The woman in the lab is just a woman, deadly but tired. Epic heroes don’t end up chained to mass-produced hospital beds with their captors calling them too fragile to taser. Even if they did, they wouldn’t stay there.</p><p>She closes the webpage. There’s no point thinking about it.</p><p>What she <em>does </em>need to think about is what she’s going to do next. The high school story passed without any problems, but she doesn’t know if it’s prompted any deeper look into Nile’s background. Anyone who looks at her deployment history is going to see they were on the same base, and <em>maybe </em>that would normally skate by – although they’d probably pull Dizzy in to ask her if they knew each other, and maybe shuffle her off lab duty just in case – but Dizzy’s already been caught on camera talking to Nile, and that’s going to send up a flag to look deeper for anyone who gets that far.</p><p>If that was going to happen it would have happened already, though. It’s been over a week. Nile was her fucking <em>corporal</em>; it’s not like the connection’s hard to find. Therefore nobody’s looking. As long as Dizzy does her fucking job, nobody will <em>continue </em>to look, and Dizzy will walk her rounds until her contract’s up and then she’ll go back to the States. If she does her job well enough, and reliably enough, then even if someone does eventually find out about the connection, she can fall back on <em>I didn’t let it compromise me</em>. She can say <em>I hated her guts</em>. She’ll wash out, of course, but honestly once this is over it might be nice to have a change of career. Maybe she’ll finally go to college.</p><p>She packs a go-bag and starts keeping it in the car. Laptop, sturdy boots, a couple of changes of clothes. Her passport and documents. A first-aid kit. A couple litres of water and a packet of water purification tablets. Cereal bars and Snickers bars, enough to keep her going for a week or so if she has to, plus several packets of protein powder. She hits up the ATM on her way to work every day until she has a thousand pounds in tens and twenties, and on her day off she goes to the bank and gets out another thousand euros. She’s not planning on going anywhere, but anything can happen. It’s smart, that’s all.</p><p>What’s less smart is driving to work, because traffic in London is fucking horrendous and <em>parking</em>, especially around Merrick Pharmaceuticals, is just about impossible. There’s a multi-story car park five minutes’ walk away, and paying to park there for the duration of her shift costs more than her Tube fare each day. It’s not like driving saves her any time, so Dizzy leaves the car at home. It’s not like she expects to need it, and if she does, five minutes away from the building might as well be on the moon.</p><p>***</p><p>“Ali, Jannery, Doctor Kozak needs extra hands in the lab.”</p><p>“Sir,” Dizzy acknowledges, half a beat out of step with Jannery. The changeover from morning shift to afternoon shift is always the busiest, and this Friday’s is looking to be about as chaotic as things ever get – which isn’t much; Keane runs a tight ship, but there are handovers and there are handovers, and this afternoon promises to be a doozy.</p><p>It doesn’t help that Merrick’s off fundraising in the States, taking Keane and half the team with him. The security team remaining at headquarters isn’t <em>under</em>staffed exactly, but the workload has definitely gone up. As she heads to the weapons locker to pick up her rifle and Glock, the stress is almost routine enough to keep her from wondering why exactly Kozak needs two more people in the lab.</p><p>Almost. Dizzy’s got pretty good at squashing the thoughts she shouldn’t be having in the two and a half weeks since she had the conversation she doesn’t think about, but anything about lab duty brings them up again. It’s getting easier to ignore them, but it’s slow going. At this rate it’ll be a year before they go away entirely, which is just one more reason not to give in and think about them.</p><p>She heads to the inner lab in lockstep with Jannery. He’s one of her cohort of newbies, and she knows he had lab duty last week and it went smoothly enough, or at least he didn’t get his fingers broken like Thompson did. He did, in the break room, express the opinion that “that Italian is fucking creepy,” and Gibson snorted and said, “Welcome to the club,” and if Jannery was paler than usual, Dizzy didn’t feel inclined to call him out on it. Not like she’s got room to fucking talk.</p><p>Jannery’s two steps ahead of Dizzy when they reach the inner lab. He pulls the door open, and the smell of blood hits Dizzy in the face like a blow.</p><p>Training keeps her back straight. Discipline keeps her walking forwards without breaking stride, into a room that smells more thickly of blood than it did when Nile bled out beneath her. Long, long force of habit keeps her face as neutral as a mask, lets her acknowledge the man coming off duty and step aside to let him pass and take up her position by the wall and turn and survey the room like it’s nothing, like it’s normal, like she sees this every day.</p><p>Blood is nothing new to her. She saw plenty in Afghanistan, and she’s seen plenty since. Hospitals are nothing new either, and if she closes down everything about herself that is more than her job, she can almost believe this is a hospital.</p><p>The bearded guy next to Nile is lying face-down on the operating table with his hospital gown pulled open. There is a lamp trained on his back, and a camera on a mechanical arm. Doctor Kozak is bent over him with a calm, focused expression. The tray beside her holds what looks like most of a human spine.</p><p>It takes a long handful of seconds before she can wrench her eyes away and give the room an actual professional once-over. The blond guy Keane shot is staring hopelessly at the corner where the ceiling meets the wall, his fingers flexing whenever the doctor’s efforts make a particularly…organic…noise. The dark-haired guy next to him isn’t looking away. He’s staring at the bearded guy with his jaw set, not blinking, and there is too much rage and anguish in his pale eyes for Dizzy to look at for long. If a single one of the straps holding him down was undone, Dizzy wouldn’t rate the doctor’s life expectancy as more than half a second.</p><p>She tears her gaze over to the other side of the room, almost can’t bear to look at Nile in case – But Nile’s not looking at her, she’s watching the doctor work with her face full of fury. The woman in the hospital bed – <em>Andromache</em> (no, don’t give them fucking names) – is watching too, but she’s looking at Kozak’s face, not her hands. Her expression is a match for the way she looked at Keane during orientation. If she ever gets loose, Kozak is dead.</p><p>Dizzy wonders how the doctor can keep working so calmly, with both of those laser stares on her. Their hatred fills the room like a static storm; every nerve Dizzy has is screaming <em>danger, danger</em>. Can Kozak not feel it?</p><p>She looks back at the bearded guy. He’s…she thinks he’s dead, at least. Fuck, she hopes he’s dead. There are things that look like scissors with combs on the ends holding his back open. Skin and muscle have been peeled aside and clamped out of the way; his shoulderblades stick up awkwardly out of the wreckage, like the wings on a downed plane. She can see bone in the bloody trench above his hips where –</p><p>Where his spine is regrowing.</p><p>It’s happening slowly, she thinks. Kozak’s <em>filming it</em>, dictating clipped notes on nerve regeneration times into a shoulder recorder like she does this every day. Dizzy has worked in warzones and she’s steady under fire, she can handle violence, but this is –</p><p>Surgery. This is surgery. Doctors dig around in people’s guts and chests and limbs all the time, that’s <em>normal, </em>this is just more of that, it’s fine. The guy must’ve been anaesthetized before she opened him up, and he’ll be all better by the time he comes around, and even if none of that is true Dizzy <em>does her fucking job</em>, which is to be ready to handle possible threats, not to question the doctor’s work.</p><p>
  <em>Just push it down. Put it all in a box and lock it away. Don’t feel. Just do your job.</em>
</p><p>Kozak tests something with a narrow pair of tweezers and reports, “Intercostal nerve regrowth complete at T5, bone regrowth complete at L1.” She uses the tweezers to tug on something else. “Spinal cord continues to fully regenerate one vertebra above closure of the vertebral foramen. Subject remains deceased.”</p><p>Well, that’s something.</p><p>The doctor keeps going, working steadily up the man’s back. She’s almost halfway up his neck when he suddenly shudders with the agonised gasp Dizzy remembers from when the blond guy came back to life.</p><p>The dark-haired man’s eyes instantly snap from the doctor’s hands to her patient’s face. “Joe,” he says, low and urgent. “Joe.”</p><p>“Subject has revived,” Doctor Kozak reports dispassionately. She gives the dark-haired man a level look, and he returns it with one so full of venom Dizzy wants to flinch from the force of it. “Spinal cord regeneration at C1 approximately twenty-five percent complete at time of revival.” She pokes at something inside the bearded man’s neck and elicits a horrible breathless scream. “Intercostal nerve regeneration complete at C4.”</p><p>“Joe, <em>sono qui, sono qui</em>.”</p><p>The bearded man – Joe, <em>no, no</em> – tries to turn his head and cries out again. He’s breathing hard, too fast and too shallow, making awful pained noises on every breath. He’s awake. He’s awake and it’s obvious that he can feel everything she’s doing to him.</p><p>“Bone regrowth complete at T3.” Kozak clicks her recorder off. “Do I need to gag you?”</p><p>“Burn in hell,” Nile chokes out. The doctor ignores her. The dark-haired man grits his teeth, but he closes his mouth. He doesn’t look away.</p><p>Kozak keeps poking and testing things up until “regrowth of the vertebral foramen complete at C1.” Then she stands up straight and stretches. She strips off her gloves and dons a new pair before turning off her shoulder recorder and reaching for the camera. The moment the red light turns off the dark-haired man starts talking again, a desperate litany of something that might be Italian. He keeps it up as Kozak removes the spreaders and flips layers of muscle and skin back into place. Joe – the <em>subject </em>grunts in pain with each movement, but his breathing sounds…maybe a little better. Maybe not.</p><p>Kozak cleans the blood away briskly, then nods at Sands, the most senior security member in the lab. “I’m done here. You can put him back now, but I’d appreciate having the gown changed.”</p><p>“No problem,” Sands says, and jerks his head at Dizzy as the doctor takes her camera and leaves the lab. Dizzy swallows hard, puts her rifle down, and goes to help him.</p><p>For someone who just had Kozak poking around in his backbone, J – <em>the bearded man</em> is amazingly ready to jump at an opening. Dizzy pins his wrist to the arm of the operating table with one hand as she pops the straps open, and immediately has to get him in a wrist lock as he tries to jab his elbow into her stomach. Sands grunts and twists the man’s other arm up behind his back, using his weight to pin him down. “Jannery, headshot.”</p><p>“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Nile growls, but more like it’s an expression of disgust than like she expects it to do any good. It takes everything Dizzy has not to flinch. Jannery steps around her and lines up his Glock on the back of the bearded man’s head. Dizzy spots the strap buried in the curly hair and realises that the guy’s been gagged just as the shot <em>crack</em>s off the walls of the lab.</p><p>Moving the guy’s body is a lot easier when he’s dead. Dizzy helps Sands get the new gown onto him and roll him over, averting her eyes as much as she can. She undoes the gag and then focuses on getting the restraints done up again, legs-waist-chest-arm. She’s buckling the wrist strap when the bearded man gasps back to life.</p><p>“Joe,” the Italian says. Joe spits the gag out and answers in the same language his friend’s been speaking, voice worn-out and unsteady.</p><p>Dizzy picks up her rifle. She takes up her position again. She stares at the wall of the lab and she tries not to listen to the conversation happening in front of her, to the broken reassurance in their voices, to the quiet offers of comfort from the other three captives. She tries not to think of anything at all.</p><p>***</p><p>Later that night, in the darkest corner of the most run-down bar she knows, Dizzy downs her fourth shot of the evening and stares at the grimy wall. Instead of the flaking paint, she sees shelves of wires and timers, an IED-builder’s workshop, lit by sunlight through an open door and not flickering fluorescent tubes.</p><p>
  <em>“Dizzy! A little help, please?”</em>
</p><p>Hell, the sound Nile made. Dizzy heard it in her dreams for a long time after she left Afghanistan. She can hear it now, as clearly as if she was standing there.</p><p>
  <em>“Nile! Medic! Man down!”</em>
</p><p>Dizzy waves to the bartender and gets another shot. Knocks it back in one like that’ll burn the memory out of her head, drown it out and leave her clean. Fuck, if only.</p><p>They were friends, once. They were more than friends. They were sisters in arms, once, and Dizzy always knew that Nile would have her back, no matter what. They might have died but they knew they would go out together.</p><p>And now Nile’s strapped to an operating table, and it’s Dizzy’s job to keep her there.</p><p>Dizzy gets a bottle of whisky. The one advantage of places like this is that the bartender doesn’t ask if she’s sure or try to cut her off for her own good, he just takes the money she slides across the table and hands her the bottle. He won’t look out for her if anyone tries to take advantage later, either, but Dizzy doesn’t want anyone looking out for her. She’s got her K-Bar in her boot and honestly, she’s not sure if she could be bothered to use it.</p><p>The whisky burns the back of her throat and sends her off on a different track of memory lane.</p><p>Keane shot the blond guy as a demonstration, Dizzy’s first day in the lab. Before he went in, he asked Kozak if any of them were off limits, and she said <em>Just Andromache.</em></p><p>If the blond guy had been off limits, he would have shot one of the others. It was a demonstration. Shooting them was the whole point. If the blond guy had been off limits, he would have shot one of the others, and if all three of the men had been off limits, then Keane would have shot Nile.</p><p>Keane probably has shot Nile. People sign on to the team looking to stay long-term, but there are always injuries, illnesses, people wanting a different line of work. Working on lab duty there’s always the risk of fatalities; the handling restrictions they were given exist for a reason. Over five years, that’s – how many inductions? One-in-four odds each time, assuming Keane doesn’t have a grudge against the blond guy in particular and picks a target at random. Twenty-five per cent chance of a bullet to the heart, just to demonstrate that no, you really can’t die.</p><p>Dizzy shudders. Swallows. Wonders what would have happened if the blond guy hadn’t caught Keane’s attention and therefore the bullet, when they walked into the lab on induction day. Wonders what she would have done if the first time she’d ever seen Nile again had been watching her die a second time.</p><p>
  <em>“Come here. Stay with me. Look at me. Look at me, you’re gonna be okay. Nile. Nile!”</em>
</p><p>How many times has Nile died in that lab?</p><p>This is her <em>job</em>. Dizzy takes three swallows from the bottle, blindly, and somehow she doesn’t cough it all back up again. This is her fucking <em>job</em>, it’s not personal, it’s not like she <em>asked </em>to keep Nile prisoner so that Kozak can cut her up while she’s fucking awake so she can feel all of it. Fuck, if she’d known Nile was here before she took the job she’d never have gone anywhere near Merrick Pharmaceuticals, she’d have gone and told Jay and fuck knows what they would have done next, but she’s here now and there’s <em>nothing she can fucking do about it.</em></p><p>
  <em>“You’re okay, it’s okay, stay with me, just look at me.”</em>
</p><p>Dizzy takes another swig from the bottle and misjudges it, nearly breathes it in and this time she does cough, spluttering whisky all over the sticky wooden panelling. The world’s gone unsteady and hazy around the edges but she can still see the lab just fine, can still see the bright lights and the straps and the blood pooling on the padded tabletop.</p><p>How many more times is Kozak going to want to – how many times is Dizzy going to have to be there when – how many times is it going to be Nile? Dizzy’s going to have to turn them over again, going to get someone in a wrist lock because they’re struggling to get away from being tortured to death again and again; one day Dizzy’s going to be the one dishing out headshots because it’s quicker and easier than sedation. One day she’s going to be turning Nile over so Kozak can cut her spine out piece by piece, and the mercenaries strapped down in that lab are going to be trying to distract Nile from what’s coming, because they’re better friends to her than Dizzy is.</p><p>
  <em>“Look at me, okay, medic’s on their way. Medic’s on their way -”</em>
</p><p>Why the fuck did she ever take this job?</p><p>Dizzy closes her eyes and presses her forehead against the top of the bar. She wonders what it feels like to be cut opens like that. She wonders what it feels like to die.</p><p>She wonders what it feels like to come back.</p><p>She wonders how much more she’s going to have to drink to forget that her life is nothing more than her job and her dad and the calls she gets from Jay and that’s the way she fucking <em>likes it</em>, because honour is a lie and loyalty is a lie and the only truth in the world is that you survive by being <em>useful</em>, and only if you’re useful in the right way. Dizzy learned that lesson in Afghanistan and she only had to learn it once.</p><p>
  <em>“It’s okay, it’s okay, medic’s coming, you’re going to be just fine.”</em>
</p><p>Nile’s never going to be fine again. Nile is always going to be fine, and that’s the fucking problem.</p><p>***</p><p>A new week and she’s back on night shifts. Dizzy drives to work, because at this time of night it’s just quiet enough that it’s faster than the Tube, and empty enough that she can actually find somewhere to park on the street. She walks the last couple of blocks with the evening drizzle beading in her hair. The bruises she picked up in the fight after someone nicked her whisky ache, distantly.</p><p>At least she went on her bender the night before her day off. The hangover’s worn off, leaving her worn out and restless with leftover anger. She can turn that into briskness, just about.</p><p>On shift she answers Morton and Rusco’s idle chatter as briefly as she can and still be halfway polite. They get the idea after a while and mostly talk to each other, not saying anything that requires her to do more than grunt. Everyone has their off days.</p><p>Morton takes the eight o’clock round. Rusco takes the ten o’clock. Neither of them reports any singing. Dizzy sure wouldn’t be in any mood to sing two days after what happened on Friday.</p><p>“I’ll take the lab round,” she says when midnight rolls around, and sets off into the shadowed rooms with her rifle, same as always.</p><p>Honour is a lie. Loyalty is a lie. Trust is the only real thing in life, but <em>trust </em>is a nebulous thing, dependant on enlightened self-interest and cold calculation. Dizzy has built her life on having <em>worth</em>, on a reputation people like Merrick will see value in, because that’s the way the world works once you strip all the bullshit away.</p><p>When Keane gets back, she’ll ask for reassignment. It’ll be shitty, but she can make it work. She’s good at making it work, this life where she carries a gun for money and doesn’t ask questions. She’s good at doing it the smart way.</p><p>One of the mysterious laboratory machines has been left running overnight, doing whatever it does with immortal cells and tissue. It beeps occasionally. Other than that, everything’s quiet.</p><p>She does her job. She does her job <em>right.</em> Doing her job right is the only thing that matters in this world. It’s what makes her worth hiring, what makes her too valuable to waste on a whim, it’s what keeps her safe. It’s <em>smart</em>.</p><p>She opens the door to the inner lab and steps all the way inside, letting it swing shut behind her. The lab is quiet, but it’s quiet like the barracks tent in Afghanistan used to get sometimes, when half of them were asleep and the other half were whispering to each other as they drifted off, and they all fell quiet when someone went past on patrol.</p><p>She shouldn’t say anything. She should just turn around and leave.</p><p>“Do you have anywhere to even <em>go</em>?” she demands of the room in general.</p><p>“Many places,” the Italian man replies. His eyes are half open, glittering in the safety lighting. He seems remarkably calm, considering.</p><p>Dizzy tightens her grip on the rifle. “Somewhere Merrick doesn’t know about?”</p><p>“Yes.” He doesn’t elaborate.</p><p>She can still turn around. She can still report a conflict of interest. There’s still time to do this the smart way.</p><p>Nile’s looking at her. Dizzy doesn’t even know if what she sees in Nile’s face is <em>hope</em>, it’s just…it reminds her of the way Nile looked at her and Jay when they were Marines together, back when Dizzy thought <em>Semper fi </em>meant anything at all.</p><p>She can still do this the smart way. She can still do this the easy way.</p><p>She’s so very fucking tired of turning her back on Nile.</p><p>“Oh, <em>fuck me</em>,” Dizzy says with feeling, and goes to do the right thing for once.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>If you want a better image of what Kozak had in Joe's back, look up 'Weitlaner Retractor' and prepare to be disturbed. :D</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. The Escape</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Six guards on this floor, four in the lobby, reserve team of eight on standby.” It takes her six strides to cross the floor to Nile. She puts down the rifle with barely enough care to make sure it doesn’t discharge and starts popping the straps open, wrist-arm-chest-waist. Nile’s skin is warm against her fingers. Nile’s face is – Dizzy can’t think about that grin, there’s no <em>time</em>. “ETA for the reserve team is two minutes once the alarm goes, depends how closely they’re watching the cameras -”</p><p>“Go get Andy,” Nile says urgently, and saves Dizzy having to ask <em>who </em>by grabbing her shoulder and pushing her towards the hospital bed. Dizzy leaves her to get the last few straps loose and goes. She leaves the rifle behind; two people armed is better than one and she wants – <em>needs</em> – Nile at her back.</p><p>She can’t believe she’s doing this. She can’t believe she didn’t do this three weeks ago, her heart is in her throat and this feels so <em>natural</em> –</p><p>Andromache – Andy, okay – is restrained with heavy padded cuffs – <em>locking</em> cuffs, not buckled, <em>fuck. </em>“Where’s the key?”</p><p>“Up there.” Andy nods at a hook set into a pole at the head of the bed. Dizzy fumbles the key off and jams it into the lock on the second try. Behind her, Nile rolls off the operating table with a <em>thump </em>and starts unclipping Joe’s restraints. Andy’s eyes settle on her, startlingly clear for a woman who just woke up. “Where’s Merrick?”</p><p>“In the States,” Dizzy answers distractedly. The cuff clicks open and she leans across the bed to get the other one; Andy yanks out the I.V. taped to her elbow and tilts her wrist to make it easier for Dizzy to reach.</p><p>“What’s he doing in the States?” Joe demands from behind her, accompanied by a clatter from an operating table.</p><p>“Schmoozing!” Dizzy snaps. Fucking tiny <em>locks </em>–</p><p>The second handcuff clicks open. Andy takes the key and sits up with a wince to start working on the ankle cuffs. “Kozak?”</p><p>Dizzy shakes her head. “She went home. I don’t know where.”</p><p>Andy doesn’t swear, just sets her jaw and nods grimly. Then she shakes her head and glances up at Dizzy, all level control. Her hands don’t pause. “Fastest way out of the building?”</p><p>“There’s an elevator on the other side of the floor that goes down to a loading bay,” Dizzy says, swallowing. “No guards, and it opens straight onto the street.”</p><p>“Good enough,” Andy says, and swings her legs off the bed like she hasn’t been chained to it for most of the last five years. She pushes herself up more slowly. She moves like an athlete; if she wasn’t standing so close, Dizzy wouldn’t notice the traces of stiffness in Andy’s shoulders, or the pale scars curving down the side of her throat.</p><p>“Andy?” the Italian says.</p><p>Andy shakes her head. “I’m fine, Nicky.”</p><p>“Can you run?” Joe asks, sounding worried.</p><p>Andy actually smiles, a bright flash of teeth. “If it kills me.”</p><p>“Dizzy?” Nile asks softly. “Have you got a handgun?”</p><p>Right. “Yeah,” Dizzy says, pulling her Glock out of her waistband and turning.</p><p>Joe’s standing at an angle to Nile, who’s crouching by the door with the rifle to her shoulder, ready to fire if it opens again; anyone who opens the door is probably going to see Joe and go for him before they spot her. Dizzy doesn’t recognise his stance, but she does know how it looks when someone knows how to fight, and he does. Nile’s shoulders are tight and her knuckles are standing out, but her grip on the rifle is good. Dizzy checks the magazine and tucks in behind her.</p><p>Joe holds his hand out. Dizzy stares at him.</p><p>“If you get shot you’re going to stay down,” he points out, and okay, <em>yeah, </em>but that doesn’t make her more comfortable about <em>not having a way to defend herself. </em></p><p>Unfortunately, he’s right. They have two guns between six people of whom four can’t die, which means Dizzy taking one of them is objectively stupid, and they don’t have time for this anyway. The rest of the security team could show up any second now. Even if the alarm hasn’t gone yet (for fuck’s sake, is Gibson in the bathroom or something?), walking the lab round doesn’t take <em>that </em>long; Rusco and Morton are going to be wondering where she is in a minute and Dizzy doesn’t think she has a decent lie in her.</p><p>She hands the Glock over. Joe thumbs the safety off and goes to cover Nile.</p><p>Nicky finishes helping the blond guy get his restraints off and pulls him to his feet. The blond guy pauses to hunt through the clutter on the nearest countertop, which is doomed to failure because part of the handover from afternoon shift to night shift is making sure there’s nothing sharp out, which Dizzy knows because she’s heard Thomson grumble about hunting for scalpel blades and everyone else in the room presumably knows rather better than she does. It’s not often that she wishes a security team was a bit less thorough, but right now it would be <em>really helpful.</em></p><p>“Leave it, Booker,” Nicky says tersely, and Booker abandons the search with a muttered, “<em>Merde.”</em></p><p>And then the lights flash red, an alarm howls on the other side of the door, and Dizzy’s radio crackles.</p><p>“<em>Breakout in progress! All teams, doctor’s lab, NOW!</em>”</p><p>“<em>Shit!</em>”</p><p>A hand closes around Dizzy’s elbow. “Stay tight to me,” Andy tells her, pulling her to the side. Dizzy gets the feeling that what she really means is <em>stay out of the way</em>. Joe slaps the Glock into Nicky’s hand and Nicky shoulders the door open without breaking stride, and Nile comes out of her crouch and charges out of the lab right behind him and that’s it, they’re <em>leaving</em>.</p><p>At the end of the switchback Nicky veers towards the freezer room door. “Other way!” Dizzy yells, and Nicky changes direction so fast his bare feet skid on the linoleum. Nile ends up in front. Dizzy’s hands are itching for a gun; she shoves her hand into her pocket and grabs her Taser even though it’s not going to help her at any sort of range because at least it’s <em>something</em>. Six people and two guns and standard procedure on floor fifteen is <em>shoot to kill and restrain the body</em>, which means she <em>really </em>can’t afford to get hit, which means she’s going to need to be ready to take cover very fucking fast and also that all of them are so very, very fucked.</p><p>“Which way am I going?” Nile yells.</p><p>“Straight across, take a left at the corridor!”</p><p>Nile hits the door at a run and immediately staggers under multiple shots to centre mass. Dizzy’s scream catches somewhere in her throat – <em>no Nile medic man down –</em></p><p>Nile doesn’t go down. She staggers backwards into Booker, who catches her elbow and steadies her. Nicky fires off two neat double-taps, then abandons shooting in favour of charging; a round takes him through the shoulder and he barely even flinches. Nile shakes her head and straightens up, squeezes off three frantic shots from the hip and follows Nicky into the lab at a sprint.</p><p>Booker and Joe go next, falling out to the sides as they clear the door and looking around wildly. When Dizzy and Andy pile out, they’re in the middle of the group, with Nicky and Nile halfway across the room already, and there’s one body crumpled in the doorway there already, Dizzy can’t tell who, and at least one bloody stain in the back of Nile’s gown.</p><p>Dizzy’s radio crackles again. “<em>Six targets</em>,” Gibson reports in a clipped voice. “<em>Regard Agent Ali as hostile.”</em></p><p>Dizzy flips off the nearest camera with her free hand and looks over her shoulder in time to duck under a rifle shot from one of the other teams on the floor. Booker takes at least one round to the back and stumbles sideways into Andy, who grabs something off the nearest counter to chuck at the shooter, then gets her shoulder under his arm and hauls him towards the corridor. Booker fumbles his arm across her back and drapes himself across her like a coat, which slows them both down but means the next shot takes him high in the shoulder instead of going through her skull. There’s another explosion of rifle fire up ahead as Nile and Nicky reach the corridor to the elevator, and a horrible gargling noise as someone gets hit in the throat.</p><p>Dizzy pitches her Taser at the shooter as she scrambles for cover, then yanks off her radio and throws that too. He dodges, and Dizzy ducks behind Malvin’s favourite machine. There’s another fusillade of shots and a cluster of bloody patches appear in Booker’s back right as he and Andy reel through the doorway, and then a round from the other side of the lab where the third fucking floor team has shown up takes out the screen above Dizzy’s head.</p><p>She swears and dives forwards and Joe grabs her arm and pulls her up and they run. They’re nearly there when Joe stumbles, hard, <em>shit </em>he’s been hit but he’s still going and Andy’s in the doorway with a pistol and her face pulled tight  –</p><p>Dizzy hurtles through the doorway and nearly trips over Rusco’s body. Nicky’s slumped against the wall with a hole the size of her thumb in his throat; Morton’s lying a couple of feet away, choking on lungs full of blood, and Booker’s on his knees spitting blood as he fumbles with Morton’s discarded submachine gun. Andy is firing steadily through the doorway and making <em>zero </em>fucking effort to take cover, even when a bullet zips past her ear and takes out the window.</p><p>Joe drops to his knees and scoops Rusco’s rifle up, turning to return fire through the doorway. Andy waits just long enough for Booker to back him up and takes off towards the elevator. Dizzy scrambles to Morton on her hands and knees, grabs the pistol out of his pocket, checks it reflexively – full magazine, safety on – shoves herself to her feet, and sprints after Andy.</p><p>She skids around the corner on Andy’s heels to find Nile slumped against the wall by the elevator, her face screwed up in pain. She yanks the rifle up as they appear, then lowers it with a sigh of relief and slumps back against the wall, screwing her eyes shut. “Elevator’s coming.”</p><p>Andy glances back towards the fight, and then looks up at the floor indicator as it flicks from ninth to tenth. “Where’s the reserve team based?”</p><p>Dizzy thumbs the safety off the pistol. “Fourteenth floor.”</p><p>Response time for the reserve team is two minutes, officially, but that includes the time it takes to get to the source. It’s got to have been less than a minute since the alarm went, but surely it’s enough time to have grabbed their weapons and started moving, and fifteenth floor is lousy with cameras; there’s no way Control hasn’t worked out where they’re going. All the reserve team has to do is intercept the elevator.</p><p>Reserve might be fast enough. It might not be. They absolutely cannot afford to assume that it won’t be.</p><p>Andy breathes out something that’s almost definitely a curse. “With me.”</p><p>Andy ghosts up to the elevator doors and flattens herself to the wall beside them, pistol held up and ready. There’s something predatory in her eyes, and Dizzy tries not to look at it as she mirrors Andy on the other side. Feels weird to be to doing this with a pistol and not a rifle, but <em>whatever</em>, she can make it work. There’s not really enough room for Nile to get behind her, but –</p><p>Nile does not tuck in behind either of them. Nile stares at her, and at the doors, and swallows hard. Her jaw tightens. She pushes away from the wall, leaving a bloody smear on the plaster, and limps out into the middle of the corridor to stand in full view of the doors with Dizzy’s rifle braced against her shoulder.</p><p>“Are you <em>trying</em> to get shot?” Dizzy hisses.</p><p>“Better me than you,” Nile replies, and doesn’t move.</p><p>…Nile is in fact trying to get herself shot. Nile is trying to get herself shot so that Dizzy and Andy won’t, which is both Nile to the bone and not <em>remotely </em>okay<em>.</em></p><p>“Nile,” Andy says quietly, while Dizzy’s trying to figure out how to express this. “If they throw out a grenade, shoot out the window and jump.”</p><p>“I’m not leaving –” Nile starts furiously, and cuts herself off. “It’s stopped.”</p><p><em>Shit</em>.</p><p>Well. Okay, then. Dizzy breathes in slowly and mentally runs through where to aim on an opponent who’s wearing body armour. One pistol, no reloads; she’ll need to make every shot count. At least they can only fit so many people in the elevator.</p><p>Not that it’s going to matter, if they chuck out a grenade. In these close quarters they’ll be scraping what’s left of her off the walls. Merrick might be pissed about losing Andy, but nowhere near as pissed as he’ll be about losing the rest of them. Reserve might think it’s worth it.</p><p>“We’ll be dead,” Andy says bluntly. Her eyes are oddly gentle, but there’s no compromise in her voice. “And if the others don’t make it, they’ll need you to come back for them. You need to get out of here.”</p><p>Dizzy can imagine Nile’s mutinous expression without having to look, because it’s been five years but apparently some things never change, and one of them is that Nile takes <em>no man left behind </em>like a Commandment. She can also hear muffled thumping coming up the elevator shaft between the erratic gunshots from down the corridor. She might die in the next ten seconds, but that’s always a risk in her line of work, and she knew that going in. What matters is that Nile makes it out.</p><p>Please, fuck, just let Nile make it out.</p><p>“Nile,” she says, and isn’t sure if she’s begging.</p><p>“I’m not letting that happen,” Nile cuts her off. “<em>Incoming</em>.”</p><p>The doors swish open.</p><p>Nile fires twice. Whoever’s in the elevator fires back a <em>lot</em> more than twice. Dizzy doesn’t see how many of them hit; she’s already swinging around the doorframe into the elevator half a beat behind Andy and there’s no time to think about anything except what’s in front of her.</p><p>Three people, one with a grenade launcher; he’s on the ground with a hole in his forehead and the two still standing have submachine guns. Dizzy shoots the one on the left in the leg from about a foot away, and as he doubles over she steps in close to shoot him again in the head. Andy grabs the one on the right by the wrist, shoots him in the throat, clubs him across the face with her pistol and then drops his dying body over her shoulder in a throw that dumps them both clear out of the elevator.</p><p>Fucking hell, Dizzy can see why Keane warned the newbies about her. This is how Andy fights after <em>five years chained to a bed</em>?</p><p>She checks the bodies. All three shooters are solidly dead. (The one with the grenade launcher has three splinted fingers which Dizzy does not have time to care about.) Andy’s up, stumbling as she rolls to her feet. Nile –</p><p>Nile is crumpled on the floor with a spray of bullet wounds in her chest.</p><p>Dizzy doesn’t even realise she’s moving until she’s crouching next to Nile. There are so many bloody patches in the hospital gown that they’ve run together, too many to even try counting, but Nile is somehow still breathing, in a horrible wet, wheezing way. Still breathing, her face screwed up in pain and fear and stubbornness, and already trying to push herself up with a hand that’s missing a thumb, because Nile does not know when to quit, and never has.</p><p>“C’mon,” Dizzy pants, and manages to get an arm under Nile’s and pull her to her feet. Blood soaks into her sleeves from the exit wounds. Nile can’t take any of her own weight, although she tries to compensate by propping herself up with the rifle. She fists her hand in Dizzy’s sleeve and rests her forehead on her shoulder, breathing raggedly.</p><p>There’s another burst of gunfire from back up the corridor, followed by shouting. Dizzy makes out Joe’s voice in the din, and somebody yelling, “<em>Go, go!</em>”, and shit, the rest of the reserve team must be about to arrive if they haven’t already, they need to get <em>off this fucking floor.</em></p><p>She tows Nile back towards the elevator. Joe staggers around the corner half-carrying Nicky, who’s clutching her pistol even though he’s still wheezing nastily through the hole in his trachea. Booker appears behind them, backing up slowly with Morton’s SMG pressed to his shoulder and looking <em>seriously </em>the worse for wear; Dizzy doesn’t think he was this pale even when Keane shot him dead on her first day in the lab.</p><p>The elevator really was not designed to hold six people. Absolutely none of them care. Andy kicks one dead guard’s arm out of the way of the door as they stumble in, taking Nicky’s weight and passing Joe a spare SMG. Dizzy ends up squashed back into a corner, hugging Nile close with one arm as she jabs at the control panel with her free thumb. Booker hangs back at the corner until Andy and Joe yell at him to <em>get the FUCK in here you idiot </em>and then runs for it, squeezing inside just as the doors close.</p><p>A bullet ricochets off the outer doors or the doorframe or <em>something</em> half a second later, the sound ringing louder in the confined space. It doesn’t stop the elevator descending. Dizzy holds her breath as they reach the fourteenth floor, but the elevator goes straight on down to thirteenth without anybody pitching a grenade in. The rest of the reserve team must have gone up to flank them on fifteenth.</p><p>Shit, they might actually make it out of this.</p><p>“Almost there,” Nicky murmurs, dropping his head back against the wall. The hole in his throat has sealed over, but he still looks pretty strung-out. His eyes stay locked on the floor indicator, like he’s waiting for it to change direction. Joe bumps their shoulders together gently.</p><p>Booker coughs up a wet spray of blood. “Car?”</p><p>“Two blocks down on the right.” Dizzy hugs Nile tighter. Thank fuck she drove in tonight. Thank fuck she filled the tank. Thank fuck for a lot of things, except…“We’ll have to go past the lobby.”</p><p>Joe lets out a thin, strained laugh, not taking his eyes off the door. “You really didn’t plan this, huh.”</p><p>”I almost came in on the train. Do you know how hard it is to find parking around here?”</p><p>Andy lets out a breathless bark of laughter. “We’ll make it work, kid.”</p><p>Nile squeezes Dizzy’s hand and makes another attempt at getting her feet under her. This time she sways but doesn’t collapse, and Nicky puts a hand out to steady her without looking. Dizzy loosens her death-grip and tries unsuccessfully to find somewhere to put her left foot that isn’t on a corpse.</p><p>(That isn’t on Thompson. Who she didn’t know very well, but that doesn’t make her comfortable about standing on his body, not when she’s the reason he’s dead and not cheating at cards in the rec room. He wasn’t expecting this. None of them were, son of a bitch, Rusco was complaining about the problems he’s been having with his boiler five minutes ago.)</p><p>Everyone has their weapons up when the doors open, but the loading bay is miraculously clear – well, not miraculously; it’s not possible to get into it from the ground floor without going outside and coming in through the street, and the lobby team was probably counting on reserve to deal with it. It’s still a massive relief. They all pile out, Nile stumbling at first but getting steadier as she crosses the floor.</p><p>Andy pauses in front of the door and looks everyone over, then nods. “Stay close. We’re getting out of this together.”</p><p>She shoulders the door open. Muggy London air pours in.</p><p>They run.</p><p>Gunfire shatters the ground-floor windows before they’ve gone ten feet. The lobby team might not have gotten to the loading bay but the whole front of the lobby is fucking floor-to-ceiling glass, and the lobby itself is <em>way too fucking long</em>. Dizzy fires back without bothering to aim and puts everything she has into running like hell.</p><p>Getting past the building doesn’t solve everything, because even if the angle is terrible, there are plenty of windows on the fifteenth floor for everyone <em>else </em>to shoot out of. Bullets skip off the pavement ahead of her. A car alarm whoops to life, and then another one, and someone screams and staggers, keeps running with pained gasps –</p><p>She’s halfway across the road when something hits her in the back, hard enough to knock the breath out of her. She stumbles, only doesn’t fall because Booker grabs her arm and hauls her up again, gets her feet back under her and keeps running and the car is up ahead, they have to be nearly there.</p><p>Dizzy shoves her hand into her pocket and fumbles for her keys. The lights click on in the car up ahead and Dizzy wrenches the door open and throws herself into the driver’s seat, jamming the key into the ignition. Andy collapses into shotgun and twists around to fire out of the window. Nile vaults into the back seat on top of Nicky coming the other way and there’s a last burst of cover fire from Joe as he scrambles in and Dizzy slams the handbrake down and floors the gas and goes from zero to forty before Booker’s got the side door all the way shut.</p><p>“Everyone still with me?” Andy calls. Shit shit <em>shit</em> if they have to stop –</p><p>“Yeah.”</p><p>“<em>Si.</em>”</p><p>“Here, boss.”</p><p>“’M good,” Nile volunteers, and Dizzy <em>almost </em>relaxes.</p><p>“They’re following us!” Nicky shouts. He’s kneeling up on the back seat with his arm on the headrest, and past his shoulder – <em>shit,</em> yeah, those are headlights.</p><p>Nile shoves the rifle into Nicky’s hands and he swings it up to aim out of the back window. Dizzy swings the wheel and goes down the first turn-off she sees. She takes the corner too fast and nearly swings up onto the pavement, takes another barely slowing down; they need to lose pursuit, <em>fast</em>, and at this time of night there’s no traffic to hide in. They’ve got a good lead, but it might not be enough. She has no idea where she’s going but they can sort out directions later, as long as she doesn’t get stuck in a dead end which given how London is laid out is <em>way too fucking likely.</em></p><p>On the other hand, they’re not defenceless. The fifth time she swings around a corner, Booker nearly goes out of the driver’s-side window, mostly because he’s leaning out of it to aim backwards. There’s a frantic scramble to pull him back in, accompanied by fabric ripping. Dizzy takes her foot off the gas and makes the next turn at a more sedate pace. When she glances in the rear-view mirror, Nicky’s still kneeling up on the seat, and Joe and Booker are still aiming out of the windows, but now they’re keeping the weapons completely <em>inside </em>the car and tucked mostly out of sight, which is not so good for aiming but probably a lot better for not getting spotted by the police.</p><p>Who are going to be more of a problem than Keane’s people really damn soon. Sirens are already howling and that’s only going to pick up. So far the closest ones sound like they’re a few streets away, heading back towards Merrick Pharmaceuticals, but that’s not going to last; speeding away from a building they just shot their way out of makes this car a priority target and just because the cops won’t execute her and haul Nile right back to that operating table doesn’t mean that getting caught by them is <em>safe.</em></p><p>(Assuming that the cops don’t have orders to give them back, assuming the government isn’t on board with it, how did Nile end up in that lab <em>who sold her to Merrick –</em>)</p><p>They need to hide. They really, really need to hide.</p><p>“Where are we going?” she asks.</p><p>“Wales,” Andy says shortly. She’s scanning the street restlessly, fingers white-knuckled on her pistol, her eyes catching on a pedestrian at the end of the road.</p><p>That tells Dizzy exactly jack shit. “How do we get to Wales?”</p><p>“How the hell have you been finding your way around?” Booker demands.</p><p> “I have <em>satnav</em>!”</p><p>“Where’s your phone?” Nile asks urgently.</p><p>“<em>Shit – </em>left back pocket.” Dizzy jams her heels against the floor and shimmies up in her seat rather than take her hands off the wheel. Nile digs her phone out with fumbling fingers, and, instead of turning it off to avoid location tracking, chucks it out of the window. “Hey!”</p><p>“Safer this way,” Nile says grimly, boosting herself back into the seat.</p><p>…okay, yeah. Dizzy would like to be able to swear that her boss definitely can’t have put an actual physical bug on her phone, but…she can’t be sure of that. Better paranoid than dead.</p><p>“Turn right up ahead,” Andy says. “And slow down, you’ll trip the traffic cameras.”</p><p>Dizzy swears under her breath and drops back below the speed limit. Officially, private entities can’t get access to traffic camera data. Unofficially, Merrick is richer than sin and also has her licence plate on file. The oil mogul she used to work for didn’t have Merrick’s resources, and he still managed to get hold of plenty of supposedly-unavailable data on people who <em>hadn’t </em>just shot up his company.</p><p>Fucking hell, she must be insane.</p><p>Andy knows what she’s doing, though. Her directions take them well away from the city centre, and eventually into a silent residential area where the streets are empty of both pedestrians and cars. With all the windows wound down, the police sirens are audible but distant – hard to tell if anything’s heading in their direction, but at least nobody’s close on their tail.</p><p>At some invisible signal, Nicky turns around and slides down into the seat, holding his tattered hospital gown down with one hand to keep it from riding up. Joe and Booker seem to have picked up on the same thing, whatever it is; the heavy weaponry is disarmed in a few quick movements and vanishes into the footwell. Andy doesn’t let go of her pistol, but she thumbs the safety on and hooks one hand around the back of her neck, wincing.</p><p>It's tempting to close her eyes for a moment, but Dizzy doesn’t need Marine training to know how bad an idea that is. Instead she loosens her death-grip on the steering wheel, cracks her neck, and rolls her shoulders to get the cramp out.</p><p>The clock on the dashboard shows thirty-seven minutes past midnight.</p><p>Ten minutes later, she pulls out of the residential area and onto a main road out of London.</p><p>***</p><p>Once they get out onto the motorway Dizzy speeds up again until she’s flirting with the speed limit, threading the car in and out of late-night traffic. At half-past midnight there’s not much out apart from long-haul truckers, anyway. She tucks in behind the massive lorries every time they go past a traffic camera and watches London disappear in the rear-view mirror.</p><p>Well. There goes her life. By morning Keane’s people will be going through her flat, stripping it for clues and anything she might come back for. If she tries to contact Jay or her dad she’ll risk bringing Merrick down on them and using them as leverage. Everything she’s worked for, everything she’s built – safety, security, her reputation. All gone. She’s just blown up her whole life.</p><p>Keane’s going to be hunting them. Mostly the others, Dizzy isn’t that important, but – she’s the one with the car, the bank account, the current documents; she’s the one who’s going to be easiest to track. That would be enough to target her for, even if she hadn’t just helped kill at least five of her teammates and broken Merrick’s most prized research subjects out from under his nose. Merrick’s going to be pouring resources into finding them, and Keane is good at finding people. He’s a professional.</p><p>He's a professional, and she’s a backstabber. Professionals take that very seriously. If she gets caught, it’s only going to end one way.</p><p>Nile’s staring tiredly out of the window, one hand fisted in pale blue fabric. The street lamps cast switching orange shadows over her face.</p><p>Dizzy’s not sorry.</p><p>It's quiet in the car. Everyone’s some combination of worn-out and straining their ears for approaching sirens. Joe and Nicky sit tucked into each other with their foreheads touching, not saying anything. Booker leans his head against the window, glancing back over his shoulder every now and then. He’s crammed up against the door to make room for Nile; the back seat is a tight fit for three, never mind four. Nile sits hunched forward, staring out the windscreen over Dizzy’s shoulder. Andy leans back in her seat with her eyes half-lidded, giving quiet directions when it’s time to turn.</p><p>Up the motorway, then onto a narrower dual carriageway. Andy directs her the long way around whenever they come to a town, then back to the main road once they’re past it. There’s hardly anybody out on the side roads. If anyone <em>was </em>following them, they’d be easy to spot.</p><p>Once they get past Gloucester Andy sends her off the main road, down a tangle of narrow, hedge-lined country lanes that produce sheep at irregular intervals. After the third time Dizzy has to hit the brakes to avoid running over misplaced livestock, Andy finally deigns to put on her seatbelt. Occasionally they get back onto a main road for a few miles, only to depart from it at the earliest opportunity. It’s probably taking them five times as long to get anywhere, but on the plus side there’s hardly anyone around. Anybody trying to track camera footage is going to have a hell of a time.</p><p>Finally, when the sky is turning grey around the edges, Andy says, “Pull in here,” and Dizzy eases the car off the road into a thicket of overgrown bushes that scrape along the side panels.</p><p>“Not the cutaway?” Joe asks.</p><p>Andy shakes her head. “Too close. If they find the car they’ll know where to start looking. We need to break our trail.”</p><p>“Wet feet! Just what I missed,” Joe says philosophically, making Andy snort with laughter.</p><p>“The sooner we start, the sooner we’re done,” Nicky says affectionately, and the car shakes as he and Joe climb out, letting in a wave of chilly Welsh mist. Nile slides sideways into the vacated space and stretches with a yawn. Dizzy drops her forehead onto her crossed wrists and just breathes for a minute.</p><p>Her palms have left a rime of dried blood on the steering wheel, Nile’s or Morton’s or both. It’ll wipe off. The bloodstains in the back seat, not so much, although the fabric’s dark enough that they won’t show up at a casual look.</p><p>Andy cracks her neck with a wince, fishes Dizzy’s Swiss Army knife out of the glove box, and passes it back to Booker. “All right, Book, let’s get the plates off. You two know how to clear a car out?”</p><p>Dizzy sighs and sits up, scrubbing the stickiness from her eyes with a bloodstained sleeve. Fucking <em>night shifts</em>. “Yeah.”</p><p>“I remember,” Nile says. Andy nods and climbs out, apparently not bothered by the cold despite the fact that the gown she’s wearing provides approximately fuckall protection from the elements. Booker grunts and hunches his shoulders against the breeze when he follows her, so it’s not just an immortal thing. Or a really-old-people thing. It might be a former-immortal thing, who knows.</p><p>“You okay?” Nile asks quietly, slotting a magazine into the rifle.</p><p>Dizzy shakes her head. “Yeah, ‘m fine. You?”</p><p>“Better than yesterday,” Nile says wryly.</p><p>Dizzy snorts as she starts checking under the seat. “You got shot how many times in the last six hours?”</p><p>Nile shrugs. “Hey, it all came back out again.”</p><p>“…are you littering in my car?”</p><p>Nile grins and flicks a bullet at her. Okay, cool. That’s a thing that can happen now. Yay. Dizzy scoops it off the dashboard and flicks it back with a vengeance, feeling her own mouth curl up at the edges.</p><p>They work in companionable silence, Nile loading the guns and passing them out to Joe and Nicky while Dizzy checks through the glove box and the side pockets, pocketing her insurance documents, a half-pack of cigarettes, and the ticket stub to a movie she saw five weeks ago and cannot remember a single thing about. Nile takes a moment to sweep deformed bullets out of the backseat into a scrap of fabric torn off someone’s hospital gown while Dizzy slides her hands down the sides of the seats in case she’s missed anything, and she makes a token attempt to wipe the blood off the steering wheel before giving up. It’s not visible unless someone’s looking closely, anyway.</p><p>Outside, Booker’s crouching in front of the car, working the screws out of the number plate. The others are on watch, Joe and Nicky covering the road while Andy stares over a low stone wall down into the valley. Or…they’re positioned like they’re on watch, anyway. Something about the way they stand, about the way Andy’s hand strokes over the lichen-spotted stone and Nicky faces fully into the wind, seems as absorbed as it does watchful.</p><p>The combination of hospital gowns and assault weaponry looks pretty odd in the middle of the countryside, but there’s not much to be done about that. Nile shivers as she climbs out of the car and the wind hits her, though, and that’s something Dizzy <em>can </em>do something about. She throws the trunk open and starts digging through her go-bag.</p><p>“I wonder if Merrick’s on his way back yet,” Nile says, glancing up at the grey sky. Dizzy hands over her spare jacket and Nile pulls it on with a nod of thanks.</p><p>“Most likely,” Nicky replies. “That man thinks there’s nothing he can’t control.”</p><p>“He knows a few things he can’t control,” Joe says, raising his eyebrows at his – boyfriend? Nicky smiles.  Andy snorts at both of them and snags Dizzy’s spare boots out of her hand.</p><p>“Okay, there we go.” Booker straightens up with both number plates balanced over one shoulder. “Are we leaving?”</p><p>Andy pulls her laces tight with an unnecessarily sharp tug. “We’re leaving.”</p><p>They go slowly as they head down the hillside. There’s not much shelter from the wind, and it’s dark enough that everyone has to look at their feet to avoid tripping over. That might be why everyone walks so cautiously. They speed up a little as the sky gets lighter and they get further down into the valley, so maybe it was just the light.</p><p>They take a winding trail through the valley itself, keeping close to hedgerows and trudging through ditches. There’s only one farm in the valley, a single house and a cluster of outbuildings, but farmers get up early and that means giving the place a wide detour. Andy scans the fields with her pistol held at the ready, and once Nicky hisses sharply and they all freeze, listening to a dog bark a couple of fields over.</p><p>It makes for a long walk, and by the time they’re hiking up a wooded hillside the sun is above the horizon and Dizzy’s feet are numb inside her boots from splashing down shallow streams. She’s slipped in the leaf litter twice, braced both times by Nicky’s hand against her shoulder. Booker and Nile are keeping their eyes on the ground, wincing when they have to look up, and Andy’s started to limp even with the boots.</p><p>Below the crest of the hill, where the trees start thinning out, the slope turns into a near-vertical rocky bank, heavily overgrown with brambles. Nicky glances up at the tumbled stone wall silhouetted against the sky at the top of the bank, paces sideways, then reaches into the mass of thorns and pulls.</p><p>“That’s grown up since last time,” Joe mutters, and goes to help him.</p><p>“When was last time?” Nile asks, putting her rifle down and grabbing a handful of bramble canes. The thorns leave long scratches that heal over instantly.</p><p>Joe screws his eyes up thoughtfully. “Nineteen-sixties, wasn’t it?”</p><p>“You haven’t been here in <em>sixty years</em>?”</p><p>Nicky laughs. “It’s a castle cellar, Nile. Other places are more comfortable.”</p><p>“And don’t have foxes in,” Joe adds, hauling at a tangled net of canes. His forearms are covered in blood, and the brambles keep leaving new cuts that heal as fast as they come.</p><p>“Will anything even still be there?” Dizzy asks. Sixty years is a long time to leave a stash, and – <em>castle</em>? Aren’t people usually all over those?</p><p>Andy shrugs, unhooking the canes Nile’s got from the ones Joe’s holding. “The cellar will still be there. Beds might not be.”</p><p>“I’m more worried about the clothes,” Booker says. He detangles a cane out of Nicky’s armful and hisses when a thorn stabs him under the thumbnail.</p><p>With the brambles pulled back, it’s possible to see a fissure in the rocks making up the bank. Andy picks her way into it, followed by Joe and Booker, and Nile climbing after them more cautiously. Dizzy follows on Nile’s heels. Nicky stays behind to pull the brambles back into a less someone-has-just-climbed-through-here arrangement, and also to pick out the scraps of fabric caught in the thorns.</p><p>The fissure curves around into a cave, low enough that Dizzy has to crouch to climb through. Nile goes through first and Dizzy waits until she calls clear to scoot after her, down a narrow tunnel that jinks sharply to the right. Dizzy worms around the bend and steps out into a room maybe the size of the living room in her apartment, with an arched stone roof, lit by the dusty oil lamp Andy’s holding up.</p><p>It’s not much. Most of the space is taken up by three ancient camp beds. The number plates have been added to a jumble of odds and ends piled up in the corner – is that a <em>spear?</em> – and Booker’s kneeling next to one of the ancient Army-style footlockers pushed against the opposite wall from the beds, lifting out blankets. Next to the tunnel mouth is a crude door of nailed planks and an ancient kerosene stove with a can of fuel.</p><p>It's a better bolthole than some places she’s seen. <em>Way </em>better.</p><p>Joe accepts a pile of clothing from Booker with a mutter of thanks, and promptly turns his back and yanks his hospital gown off over his head.</p><p>Well, it’s not like Dizzy’s any stranger to casual nudity. She turns her back and shrugs her rucksack off, then starts unbuckling her armour. After wearing it for hours, the freedom of movement always comes as a relief.</p><p>Andy and Booker strip off with a military absence of self-consciousness. After a few minutes, Nicky finally stumbles down the tunnel with stray thorns snagged in his hospital gown and wearily accepts the moth-eaten shirt Joe hands him. The footlocker produces plain, moth-eaten clothing that isn’t obviously out of date, but there isn’t much of it; Nile ends up wearing Dizzy’s yoga pants, thick socks, and a plaid shirt several sizes too big for her, with the cuffs rolled up over her wrists.</p><p>Andy wraps herself up in a blanket and settles down on the camp bed nearest the entrance, lying with her face turned to it and her handgun tucked up by her head. Joe and Nicky curl up on the one against the back wall, wrapped around each other. Nile collapses onto the one in the middle with a jangle of rusted springs. Booker sprawls out on the floor next to the footlockers. Dizzy finishes pulling on a clean shirt and sits on the edge of the bed next to Nile.</p><p>She hesitates. She’s bunked with Nile plenty of times. It’s just that back then, she’d never helped hold Nile prisoner, or held Nile’s neck together while she died, or…it’s been a long time. A lot of things have changed. The floor’s paved stone, which won’t be the most comfortable thing she’s ever slept on, but she can use her rucksack for a pillow, it’ll be fine.</p><p>“Fuckin’ get in already,” Nile mumbles sleepily, and rolls over to make room.</p><p>Dizzy lifts the edge of the blanket and climbs in beside her. The camp bed sags alarmingly. Nile’s weight is a familiar warmth against her back, the rhythm of her breathing a cadence Dizzy remembers in her bones. The dim flicker of the oil lamp is almost hypnotic.</p><p>Dizzy sleeps easily for the first time in over five years.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>I AM SO SORRY THAT THIS TOOK SO LONG. It took me a long, <i>long</i> time to get the action scenes into a form I was happy with. Pretty much every part of this chapter got rewritten at least once, and with some parts it was more like five times. That said, I hope you enjoy the update!</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
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